well i'm going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture in february of this year if you can governor rick snyder testified on capitol hill saying that right to work for less laws were not right for michigan so what's changed over the last ten months and how badly will the right to work for less law herb's the michigan economy also as tuitions rates of colleges and universities across the country continue to skyrocket tuition free universities are becoming relics of another age our students at one of the stations last to asian for universities fighting back against a first ever plan to charge tuition and last month washington state and colorado

became the first two states in america to legalize the recreational use of marijuana now comes the hard part i will the states regulate the sale and use of the drug and will the federal government let them. you need to know this earlier this year michigan's republican governor rick snyder attended a hearing on capitol hill to talk about state economies and job creation he was asked about controversial right to work for less laws that starve unions of critical funding and leave working people collecting smaller paychecks with fewer benefits and vulnerable to more workplace accidents is what governor snyder had to say about these. right to work is an issue that's a very divisive issue people feel very strongly about it so right to work is an issue that may have its time and place but i don't believe it's appropriate michigan during two thousand and twelve i don't believe it's appropriate

michigander in two thousand and twelve that's what snyder said earlier this year and yet at his behest at the end of. last week his republican colleagues in the state house and senate jammed through a right to work for less law in a rushed thursday evening vote as scores of labor protesters organized outside the state capitol only to call his fellow republicans to help him make michigan a right to work for less state snyder actually lied about the law calling it pro worker. often called right to work by many people but i think workplace fairness and equity is a better way to describe it because it's about being pro worker and giver workers the freedom to choose who they associate with for two good reasons it's time to look at workplace fairness and equity in michigan and be pro worker first workers should have the freedom to choose and second it will help with their economic growth so i encourage the legislature to get this done to pass these bills so i can sign quite a different tune earlier this year when he said a right to work for less law is not appropriate michigan during two thousand and

twelve snyder also lied that the law will help with our economic growth which isn't what he said earlier this year either. do you think there's evidence out there to show that it creates just that it helps states compete in the auto industry is a very competitive industry now in terms of their labor agreements and such so on the face of it i don't automatically have an answer but i believe it's something that we should all take the time to understand before simply people kind of revert to their traditional positions on it so then what is it but that's prompted governor snyder to revert to his traditional position on the answer a lot of corporate cash in an interview with a detroit radio station u.a.w. president bob king reacted to the passage of the state's right to work for less law saying in the end dicta vas in the extreme right wing control what's going on in the state and the koch brothers americans for prosperity was in there and there was a lot of money pushing for the passage of this legislation threatening the governor

and threatening the different representatives and even though snyder claimed he didn't want to pass right to work for less he really didn't have a choice according to michigan finance network top republican oligarchy david koch contributed more than nine hundred eighty eight thousand dollars to the republican governors association to help get rick snyder elected in two thousand and ten turns out that wasn't a contribution it was an investment so two years later when the koch funded americans for prosperity moved into the state and began building big tents in front of the state capitol and other corporate funded group started running t.v. and radio ads to promote their right to work for less law it was time for governor snyder to pay back the oligarchy suit invested in him and put him into office which is exactly what he'll do when he signs right to work for less into law this week in other words the oligarchy in the corporatocracy and not the elected democracy in michigan are responsible for passing the state's new right to work for less law

president obama was in michigan today and this is what he had to say about the whole. right to work laws that they don't have to do with economics never do a palette six. bedrooms obama's are giving you the right to work for less money. now for more on this from michigan i'm joined by cindy is straught of the vice president the united auto workers union and ryan johnson parole and probation officer for the state of michigan and from new york josh eidelson labor journalist and contributing writer to the nation salon and in these times well welcome to you all thank you thanks thanks so much for joining us and josh is in where i mean princeton new jersey i'm sorry if i so they're wrong cindy i want to i want to read you i want to start by reading you a quote from martin luther king in one thousand nine hundred sixty one he said in our glorious fight for civil rights we must guard against being fooled by false slogans such as right to work it is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights its purpose is to destroy labor

unions in the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and worker going to sions forever wherever for everyone wherever these laws have been passed wages are lower job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights and a quote how is it that fifty years i was one hundred sixty one fifty years later we're still fighting this fight and now fighting it in michigan you know the word that you were for the whole union movement and to a large extent really began. you know i think it what we see here is that you know you know we still is a strong union working families in michigan are still very strong and we have these outsiders like the koch brothers like and some insiders like to give us who are coming into this state because they still have their goal of destroying democracy and destroying workers' voice and making it in my own outlining workers they have a seat at the table i think that's really sad when the auto industry we saw that when we're going to see at the table with management that's when we're able to

reinvent as the governor would say or we're able to create and be innovative and really focus and jabs in training and education which is what we should be doing as a community what we should be doing is labor what we should be doing is management that's where the legislature should focus in michigan ryan what what kind of impact does a diminishing wages reducing worker rights as the stuff that always comes along with right to work for less basically turning michigan into alabama or mississippi what impact is that going to have. you see this as a as a proliferate probation officer what impact is i going to have a working families and in michigan. which are going to wind up doing you're creating the working class who are i mean if you lowering the wages the cost of living goes up how can the average person for absolute image i would like to see with this thing to be. when we have the gas prices several years ago people have to decide whether they want to buy food or gas in their car and that was

a was out of ways that we have right now imagine if you drop that down that's not right and that's not michigan absolutely josh the president has pretty much shied away from labor issues during the last four years during his first term you know i kept waiting and hoping for card check to come up it has still has and i don't think he mentioned it today are you surprised he was in michigan and took on the state's right to work for less law. well it's not clear to me whether he was planning to be in michigan before he already was faced with this issue with rick snyder i mean given that rick snyder surprised a lot of people rightly or wrongly perhaps we should have expected this but given that rick snyder surprised perhaps the white house by making this last minute announcement obama may have been in a jam where he was going to be there there's been frustration in the past by the failure to speak up for example earlier in wisconsin and so this is the situation

he found himself in but certainly as we move into a second term under obama it's a good sign for labor that faced with this situation obama did choose to speak with some vigor about the issue while he found himself in michigan absolutely sunday josh just pointed out the in all probability the president himself you know when this trip was first planned had no idea that he was going to be walking into a right to right to work for less explosion in his face how much notice to the u.a.w. have of this. you know we were at the table with the governor because when things going to change didn't seem to go she had a way that the legislature labor community could work together and so we didn't have a lot of notice because the governor has always taken this position that he didn't believe in right to work he didn't want it is table so we continued to talk and came up with a really a lot of really great ideas to reinvent michigan and so it was really sad because while we thought we were moving forward the governor took us by surprise and came out and announced well we're still sitting down and talking it was now on his

agenda so you know i think you failed to take to be a real leader i mean if we really had these kinds of leaders who are not in crisis they were unable to sit down and talk about a way to move forward together we would have a lot of companies today so we were really blindsided by him switching the way that he did at the last minute we start that we are moving forward with a plan to make sure that we could work together not get this divisive right ryan michigan has elected a republican governor a republican house and republican son a and traditionally republicans have opposed labor and i mean they pushed through the whole taft hartly thing back in one thousand nine hundred seven harry truman vetoed it they overturned his veto i mean everybody's always known republicans hate labor and working people how what is the what is the on the ground response in michigan to this that the president won the state but the state elect has as elected locally republicans what's how are people reacting most. people are upset i

mean you know the governor has not told a legislator is not true doesn't strike me as the koch brothers and push their agenda across united states i mean you know when you live sort of of the people that's not a very good thing to the people of the area. all who are benefiting from labor whether you're part of the union and not you're where you live based upon what the union looked good and unfortunately people have this disassociation with the union but if you turn away labor or. and you can take right where the rights of. one of their union are not. josh and the last minute we have here do you expect that we will see a blow back to this like like there was in ohio or wisconsin. well it remains to be seen i mean certainly republicans are hoping this plays out like in the end where there were protests there was a decision not to have civil disobedience at the super bowl there was promise that there would be payback in this past november election and actually republicans

games in illinois in the indiana legislature on the other hand in ohio the bill was reversed by referendum in even mitt romney was hurt so it remains to be seen the republicans apparently have tried to make it impossible to have a referendum pushing the issue to the two thousand and fourteen elections but certainly lots of governors in other states are going to be watching to see is this something they can get away with or not and the response is going to dictate that amazing send a straw to ryan johnson josh eidelson thank you all for being with us thank you for your. coming up last week hundreds of people lit up joints on the space needle in seattle given a new space needle through it to celebrate washington state's legalization of marijuana but will president obama let the states do their own thing or will he continue to push nixon's failed war on drugs.

wealthy british scientists on. time to time. markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report. more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has

been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule today.

in screwed news we don't want those think intuition feeds cooper union is one of the last completely free universities left in america and has a century old tradition of offering a college education to all of its students at no charge but all that was scheduled to change when school officials decided to start charging to ation for their graduate students and response students at cooper union took to the streets organized and rebel this all began after eleven students occupied a building in cooper union to protest the school's plans to start charging tuitions supplied with plenty of food water student activists camped out at cooper union foundation building until their school agreed to walk back installation plans and restructure its board to allow for more students and faculty input at noon today as student activists ended the week long occupation joining me now for the latest on where this ever goes victoria sobel a student activist at cooper union very welcome hi thank you for having me thanks

for joining us to begin with what is college like it cooper union a completely completely free school. you know it's very liberating and i think a lot of students will tell you that going into a school where you don't have you in the forefront of your mind think about how am i going to pay for these classes how is the interest going to add up for my loans how can i you know how can i figure out balancing paying for my living expenses and my education amongst other things is really one of the most freeing things and it allows you to work really on a different level with the faculty and the rest of the student body so i get it i think it's been a very liberating experience for me this far is the university in financial trouble me what prompted this decision to charge charging torsion for their grad student you know it's a long story and we do have more information on our website see you s.o.s. dot org but the short of it is that there has been financial mismanagement of our assets over the past couple of decades the school has been offering this free

tuition model for the past one hundred ten two hundred fifty years so over a century and again it's financial mismanagement of assets in the past within the board of just use and hirings of administration that have led us to kind of full speed ahead like stop in this problem yeah so. that the occupation has ended. yes we're on a skating team from my home in brooklyn not from the peter cooper so we left at noon today so for your demands met. we actually we talked about it a lot and it was being honest we were escorted by our d. in some of the administration and most of our full time faculty in the art school and we came to a realisation given the current state of the administration and the makeup of the board that we have students are in a better position to realize an actual eyes are demands than they are so the part of the speech that i delivered today addressed the three demands that we had stated

and you know we're going to make sure that board meetings are streamed that are they're made public that there is student and faculty representation and that's that's something that we can promise closing your demands yeah we had three and then one of them did include as well. john should prove our current presidents up and down we're going to start dialogues about that soon the students on the ground as well as the students are occupying the peter cooper suite are have already begun setting up larger structures for holding these student dialogue about how to start moving forward with either these demands or reassessing these demands so we're going to we're definitely taking action and we're going to do it and hopefully with some more unified student body or you guys following the what you know the student protests in canada that ultimately the protests against intuition i guess they were alternately successful and if so did that help inspire your action. absolutely and we're also following student actions you can or you can see i've got my red patch

here you know i think we as students at cooper union understood they were not just representative of the constituents it are stupid we're talking about really broader issues and there's a bunch of groups that really helped push us along and galvanized the path forward and the remes from straight down at occupy wall street all in the red for university and so many more there were just representatives from other schools that came out there was a lot of showing of solidarity we got letters from the netherlands from mexico which was amazing and from mcgill so you know we're very aware that our part of this larger thing that's happening and we want to be able to use our positioning and the current positioning of other students to really make our voices heard that's great victoria civil thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you for having me and wish you the best. now now on to good news regarding our nation's failed drug war colorado surprised everyone today when it's governor signed an

executive order formally legalizing marijuana in the state earlier than scheduled so with marijuana legal in washington state in colorado now the american people want the federal government to get the hell out of the way according to a new gallup poll sixty four percent of respondents said they want the feds to leave the states alone and not enforce federal law that still considers marijuana illegal only a third of americans want the federal government to stick their nose into this issue president obama can embrace progressive reform against nixon's failed drug war by doing just one thing over his next term and that's to do absolutely nothing and let washington state and colorado do their thing but will and what are some of the more complicated policy issues that come out of marijuana legalization on the state level or answer some of these questions is steve ceric executive director of the catalyst action coalition in washington state steve welcome thank you so how high are you right now steve. actually i'm probably

flyover six times the legal limit seriously should that caused us to take you more or less seriously and how does your answer to that. illustrate the difference between recreational pot recreational awful. well you know what what all the studies show and we've got studies going back forty years and these are not cheech and chong studies these are not studies from normal these are studies from the national institute drug abuse the national highway traffic safety commission the federal department of transportation not exactly pot lovers and what they've all found and they didn't want to find this they didn't want to come to this conclusion or what their conclusion was that they came to is that you cannot judge impairment by blood content for any drug except alcohol you know i so probably the classic example that is that everybody knows about is rush limbaugh taking so much

oxycontin that a normal person would have died from it and yet he was doing a radio show and nobody even figured out that he was high i mean it's just people people that all of tolerance over time when that doesn't happen with alcohol because it's not so much a drug as it is a poison and it just to get the nerves and soul aid from your system rather quickly where is it after t.h.c. it's stored your fat cells i'm old and i'm fat so it's going to stay in my system whole lot longer and it's going to stay in somebody's system who has a much higher metabolism rate and who doesn't have as many fat cells now steve you've you've been you've spoken out against this decriminalization and legalization i guess you call it in colorado is that is that because you're concerned or exit in washington is that because you're concerned about the the the the the fact that they're looking at impairment in that blood level context that you just mentioned. well the obviously to our first concern is that per se do you

i.d. laws and if you go to go to the roland d.c.p. office of national drug control policy the drug czar's website and look up drug driving you'll find out that drug. driving it's nothing like drunk driving drugged driving has no relationship to impairment drug to driving is about the new war the new strategy in the war on drugs that they initiated in two thousand and ten which is not about catching you being impaired it has no relationship to impairment it has no relationship to highway safety this is about catching you with an illegal drug in your system so now in washington you have one ounce of decriminalized marijuana but god bless you put it in your body now we're going to charge you with a much more serious crime than possession which is driving while high so given that how would you suggest i mean it seems reasonable that for any kind of drug that we

would want to have some measure for impairment we don't want to have on the road ok so what is it how should it be done well they already have standardized impairment tests they've been using for the last forty fifty years. first of all are we solving a problem that doesn't exist you've been around a long time and every every newspaper person i've ever talked to i said how many cases have you ever seen how many reports of you over a dime and someone who is just high on marijuana who cross the center line and killed a family of five and the answer is not and so and they did a study out of denver and they found that in in states city adopted medical marijuana was obviously more people are smoking marijuana in medical marijuana states that traffic fatalities dropped an average of nine to thirteen percent it's really easy to figure out because it also showed that beer sales dropped fourteen

percent well if more people are smoking marijuana why didn't traffic fatalities go up instead of going down i think every state ought to have ought have medical marijuana laws or marijuana legalization ys and me. doing save some people on the highways right that's a really important point about impairment and these are the kind of conversations that i think states and the federal government going to happy be having as we as we move forward on this any clue on how the federal government is going to react to washington and colorado and and are you hearing or you know do you have any sense or have you heard in the from the grapevine anything about how this administration might respond to these two states. well so far the the federal prosecutor here in western washington has said that they're going to continue to do the same thing they've been doing and what went to doing what the federal government has been doing they're getting ready to sentence chris williams who is

growing medical marijuana quite openly and with being inspected by local officials in montana medical cannabis for patients and they're getting ready to sentence him to essentially a life sentence of ninety years for growing medical marijuana and for some reason we're supposed to believe the people who sponsored this bill that somehow we're going to have an adult conversation with the feds and they are not going to bust all the people who are going to be growing one hundred seventy eight hundred eighty seven thousand pounds of marijuana and selling it to recreational users in the state of washington and for those people i have a unicorn for sale yeah there you go steve thanks a lot for being with us tonight you're very welcome thank you. crazy alert killer catfish it's finally happening world governments are starting to

catch on to the invasion of the robotic pigeons on the planet xeno and they're putting an end to it by deploying secret catfish killing machines well maybe researchers have discovered that a long time river of france catfish are. heavily on pigeons the bathing clean themselves and there are catfish will temporarily strand themselves in the river bank so that they can attack the pigeons and then make a meal out of them no word yet if other populations of pigeon plucking catfish exist around the globe but rumor has it the us government is starting up a super secret killer catfish breeding program and plans to release the fish all over the country so that this video and of robotic pigeons as we know stay stay tuned. after the break while president obama may have won reelection and the republicans attempt to rig the election for romney may have failed the fact it was their efforts did prevent plenty of americans from casting a vote just how many americans were denied their right to vote live on and this is

the new normal for american elections. using to see. destruction with and see. what could be just ruins. saved by a great sacrifice. and. understood by huge ethics and a remarkable reminder of courage and selflessness. proves you to is a. key to all brushed aside i.

don't like.